Merrily We Live (1938) and If You Only Could Cook (1935)

Merrily We Live has been on my Wish List for years. TCM has started showing it recently to my delight. It's difficult to describe the movie, without using the words "My Man Godfrey" and "derivative," and yet this is a wonderfully enjoyable film. I will go so far as to say I enjoyed it at least as much as the earlier far more famous flick. Billie Burke plays the ditsy mother whose habit of hiring tramps as chauffeurs has left the family destitute of silver. An early scene has the family eating breakfast using kitchen utensils. She received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for the role. Despite the "forgotten men" as servants/love interests plot device, this movie is derived from different source material, a 1926 play, "They All Want Something" and the first film incarnation of it, What a Man (1930).

Brian Aherne plays Wade Rawlins a novelist who has a car accident on a fishing trip and stops at the Kilbourne mansion to use the telephone. Assuming he's a tramp looking for work, he is whisked away, protesting loudly, to be be suited up as the family's new chauffeur. One look at him in his work duds and heiress Jerry (Constance Bennett) is a goner. This is one of those moments where 1930s sensibilities are lost on me. While I think Aherne looks pretty tasty in his scruffy fishing outfit, shown above, chauffeur's uniforms always remind me a little too much of Berlin in 1939. It hardly signifies what he wears because when a tramp who isn't really a tramp and an heiress are in the same movie together, it's a sure bet they're gonna wind up getting married.

All the supporting cast are excellent including Bonita Granville as aspiring thespian/rich brat (territory that Virginia Wiedler had pretty well sown up in my book), Ann Dvorak as the chief rival for Rawlins' attention, Patsy Kelly as the sassy kitchen main and Alan Mowbray, as the family butler who quits at least once a day. This family is so screwball, even the dogs are funny, with names like "Down Boy" and "Off the Carpet" though sadly there are no wire-haired terriers present.

To add to the Dreamboat in Disguise as Servant sub-genre, If You Only Could Cook (1935) features Jim Buchanon (Herbert Marshall) as an automotive mogul who, after a rough day at the office, meets Joan Hawthorn (Jean Arthur) on a park bench while she's looking through the want ads. Mistaking him for a fellow job-seeker, she invites him to pose as a married couple in order to get jobs as a cook and a butler. Marshall of course, has his own butler, who he hits up for tips, before heading off for a few weeks vacation as a servant. Only in the movies!

Lionel Sander, best known as Max from the TV series Hart to Hart has a supporting role as one of the gangsters in the employ of Mike Rossini (Leo Carillo). The mob boss hires the couple, and then falls for Joan, which presents complications for Jim who is also in love with her. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Jim is supposed to be getting married to a woman he doesn't love in a few days. As is the way in screwball comedy, it all works out right in the end after much confusion over sleeping arrangements in the couple's cramped servant's quarters. One of Sander's lines, "If you were married to her, would you sleep on the sofa!?" sums up the tensions that drove the entire screwball genre.

Marshall doesn't quite go through the mistaken for a "forgotten man," routine. It's enough for him merely to sit on a park bench and to be branded as unemployed. Arthur is plucky and funny as usual. She always plays well as the wiser and more worldly member of a couple, and it's a nice twist to see reserved Marshall cast as her love interest. Mr. Smith and Mr. Deeds were hicks, but they were also dreamers, as is our Mr. Buchanon. He's just a bit more sophisticated.

Familiar tropes are sometimes the best because their variations delight and amuse almost more than those films which are entirely novel. During the Depression there was no greater fantasy than being a rich person with servants, unless of course it was that you were rich, your servant happened to look like a movie star and be a millionaire in disguise.

A Star is Born (1937) & What Price Hollywood (1932)

The 1930s should be in black and white. It's just plain odd to see a 1930s film in color. The exceptions to this are Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz, both 1939. It just feels weird to see the young Frederich March in technicolor. The power of the art deco sets and costumes is lost when its rendered not in silver bur a lot of green and brown. If there's one thing I learned from watching A Star is Born, it's that brown was a far more popular color in 1937 than I imagined. This gripe aside, this movie is undeniably a classic, only lessened slightly by the fact that I had just watched George Cukor's smart version of this story, What Price Hollywood, a few days before.

Fredric March is always great and he especially shines in the early part of the film, playing an actor who drinks too much and is unhappy with his girlfriend. One night he meets an ambitious waitress (Janet Gaynor) who treats him humanely. March is drunk and he ends up getting her fired, so he gets her a screen test to make up for the trouble he's caused her. She becomes an overnight sensation, while his career sinks into oblivion. His low point comes when he humiliates her at the Academy Awards ceremony with a drunken tirade. Afterward he disappears on a long bender while his wife and few remaining friends fear for his life. He returns and she pledges to give up acting to help him get sober. Unable to face being the cause of ending her career he commits suicide by walking into the sea.

In What Price Hollywood, Lowell Sherman plays the drunk, this time a director and Constance Bennett plays the waitress turned star. This story is complicated by a love triangle between Bennet, Lowell and Bennett's polo playing husband (Neil Hamilton). Cukor is a romantic comedy master and he creates a very romantic and funny foundation for the polo player and the Hollywood glamor gal. As their marriage falls apart Bennett is consumed with caring for her alcoholic friend who has fallen from grace at the studio. The question is never overtly raised but it seemed clear to me that this toxic friendship is as much a cause for her divorce as demands of her career. His suicide is handled in a way that lets the viewer believe that he was trying to keep from being a burden on his friends.

Hollywood's view of itself is always slightly strange, because it is always critical of the system that makes stars and spits them out when its had its merry way with them and yet the movies never do much to deflate the dream of overnight stardom. In fact they do just the opposite as in both films, the women are working dead-end jobs and their dreams come true with seemingly little effort. Although the dreams come with a price they still reinforced that fairytale. In the 30s contract players had a yearly option at which time the studio could decide not to continue employment. An off take at the box office or the wrong move in front of the press could end a career. Actors were never really secure and even the biggest stars were vulnerable to changeable tastes and the whims of executives. Many of the stars who rose to the top in the pre-code era, lost their audience when the code came in and dumbed down their movies, just as the stars who had been big in the silent era seemed to fade when sound came through, proving that talent and star quality, what ever it may be, is a tradeable commodity.